Web Directions

Conclusions

• Open Source dominates
• Where’s the cloud?
• Developers, devel­op­ers, developers
• The mobile web cometh?
• Best Practices on the rise
• Current browsers, not legacy browsers come first

What con­clu­sions can we draw from this broad range of 50 or so ques­tions? A num­ber of broad trends, some of which we’ve referred to already, seem to emerge from all this data.

Open Source dominates

Open Source solu­tions dom­i­nate, or play a very sig­nif­i­cant role in most areas other than client oper­at­ing sys­tems including

• the browsers respon­dents use themselves
• data­base systems
• back end pro­gram­ming environments
• server oper­at­ing systems
• web servers
• JavaScript libraries and Frameworks

The only area in which closed source dom­i­nates is client side oper­at­ing sys­tems, where 95% of respon­dents use a closed source oper­at­ing system.

Where’s the cloud?

Despite the buzz around “cloud com­put­ing”, there was lit­tle if any men­tion of cloud based solu­tions for host­ing, par­tic­u­larly ser­vices like Amazon’s EC2 and S3. While we didn’t ask specif­i­cally about the use of such ser­vices, the fact that they went vir­tu­ally unmen­tioned by respon­dents indi­cates the day of cloud com­put­ing is still on the horizon.

Developers, devel­op­ers, developers

We’ve men­tioned a num­ber of times the way that respon­dents saw them­selves pre­dom­i­nantly as “devel­op­ers”, which is also reflected in the use of JavaScript by 95% of respon­dents, and the over­whelm­ing major­ity of sites using dynamic data­base dri­ven mod­els rather than being sta­tic sites.

In future will web pro­fes­sion­als become increas­ingly gen­er­al­ists, expected to, and able to use a com­bi­na­tion of front and back end tech­nolo­gies? Or, will we see a grow­ing spe­cial­iza­tion, as the level of sophis­ti­ca­tion required for var­i­ous aspects of design and devel­op­ment increases? In future sur­veys it might be inter­est­ing to ask respon­dents what per­cent­age of time they spend on var­i­ous aspects of design and devel­op­ment — for exam­ple wire­fram­ing, page mock­ups, HTML and CSS, JavaScript pro­gram­ming, back­end pro­gram­ming and administration.

The mobile web cometh?

Despite the hype around iPhone, and Android, and the wide­spread avail­abil­ity of excel­lent browsers on a wide vari­ety of mobile devices, gam­ing plat­forms, and even tele­vi­sions, even among these early adopters, the focus is squarely on tra­di­tional web brows­ing plat­forms — the lap­top and PC.

With only around 20% of respon­dents using the mobile web, it may be at least some time before we see wide spread adop­tion of the web out­side the tra­di­tional web brows­ing con­texts, if early adopter behav­ior pre­fig­ures wider tech­nol­ogy adop­tion patterns.

Best Practices on the rise

For decade or more, indi­vid­u­als, and groups like the Web Standards Project, have advo­cated for the use of stan­dards in devel­op­ment, and a num­ber of rec­om­mended prac­tices, such as the sep­a­ra­tion of pre­sen­ta­tion, con­tent and behav­ior, the use of valid seman­tic markup, the avoid­ance of pre­sen­ta­tional markup and so on. While objec­tive stud­ies like Opera’s MAMA indi­cate that there’s still some way yet to go even among mem­ber com­pa­nies of the W3C, among respon­dents, adher­ence to these rec­om­mended prac­tices (or at the very least, accep­tance of their impor­tance) is strong.

Current browsers, not legacy browsers come first

Despite the fact that ver­sions of Internet Explorer still account for over 70% of the browsers used on the web, respon­dents to the sur­vey indi­cate that their approach is to develop to stan­dards, and only then ensur­ing (if at all) their sites work prop­erly in ver­sions of Internet Explorer. This is a sig­nif­i­cant change in a rel­a­tively short period of time. Anecdotally, we increas­ingly less often see the “best viewed in” mes­sage when brows­ing the web, and these together sug­gest we are begin­ning to see a viable browser neu­tral web for the first time since the bad old day’s of the browser wars of the mid to late 1990s.